I still prefer pidgin, but it needs a lot of love to make it a reasonably modern XMPP client:

- https://github.com/danielkraic/Pidgin-XEP-0136-plugin adds XEP-0136 (needs "mam_archive" on prosody)

- https://github.com/gkdr/carbons adds XEP-0280 (Carbons)

- https://github.com/Junker/purple-xmpp-http-upload adds XEP-363 (HTTP uploads)

- https://github.com/gkdr/lurch adds XEP-0384 (OMEMO)

- https://github.com/noonien-d/pidgin-xmpp-receipts XEP-0184 (message delivery receipts)

The real pain for Pidgin is the complete lack of XEP-313 due to Pidgin's aged logging system, and I would really like to see a working message sync for Pidgin :(

EDIT: https://github.com/CkNoSFeRaTU/pidgin apparently has had XEP-313 patched into Pidgin for years now. Combined with lurch and Carbons, message sync is working fine.